Comming back to start date and task duration

[Piotr Właziński]

Hi Cameron,

I'm a GQueues user since 2010, used full version for many years then last year I have switched for one year to try Nozbe but recently get back to GQueues. I'm trying to plan more complex projects where there are many tasks with duration of few weeks and I have found this very difficult or almost impossible to track such projects without the feature of start date and smart filtering by start date. I have red in other thread you don't have plans to introduce in near future start date within GQueues (and acompanying filtering by start date within Smart Queues).

However, I came with an idea which in my opinion could deliver a very good workaround to the issue of lack of start dates:

Currently GQueues has a feature of "task duration" which make sense only for tasks with a duration within one day. You set up start time and duration and it works fine, due day is indeed in the right day.

However for a task which would last few days or weeks it doesn't make too much sense in the current setup. Let's say a task has due date yesterday, but its duration is one week and is shown in Google Calendar for the whole upcoming week. When you filter such task it shows it's overdue while it's not true because we know from the beggining it was planned to last for a week, and, moreover, we do not see the real due date (real due date is a week from the one set as due date).

As you could consider a small (hopefully) change how the tasks with duration are represented in Google Calendar. Maybe when you set up due date with duration this duration should create connected event in Google Calendar with appropriate duration BEFORE due date.


Examples of how this could work

1) Let's say you have to deliver the report by 12am on Thursday and it will take you 2 hour to prepare. You set due date for the task on Thursday@12am and duration for 2 hours - it should create an event in the Google Calendar from 10am till 12am

2) Lets say you need to deliver task which would take 3 weeks and due date is 25th June - it should create an event in the Google Calendar from 5th till 25th June


Possible implementations:

1) Change the current behavior of creating tasks with duration from after the due date (imo not logical from the "due date" meaning point of view) to before due date (however I understand maybe some people got used to it and it would create confusion)
or

2) Introduce global option within Settings->Tasks and option e.g. "put the duration of the task to Google Calendar before due date [x]"
or

3) make point 2 default behavior and still allow to decide if the duration should be put to the Google Calendar before or after the due date on the level of the date/time popup (with pre-chosen radio button according to what was selected as a default behavior in global options)


In my opinion this would solve most of the problems which we have by not having a start date of the task, we probably all use GQueues among other reasons because of its superb Google integration and in Calendar we could track which long lasting tasks we should already start to work on while still having their real due dates available for filtering in GQueues.

Best regards,
Piotr Właziński

[Piotr Właziński]

Sorry I just realized I made a mistake in the 1st example - it should be 12pm:

1) Let's say you have to deliver the report by 12pm on Thursday and it will take you 2 hours to prepare. You set due date for the task on Thursday@12pm and duration for 2 hours - it should create an event in the Google Calendar from 10am till 12pm

Piotr

[Piotr Właziński]

I just went through the GQueues Settings menu again and it seems like much better place for such option "put the duration of the task in the calendar before the set date" would be in "Calendar" settings, somewhere around default durations at the end.

Regards,
Piotr

[Piotr Właziński]

Actually for the tasks with date and time there is no need to change the behavior, setting time when you want to start to work on the task and the duration of the task works fine at the moment, the change I'm writing about would apply only to tasks without set time, only with set date (so my 1st example is obsolete, only 2nd make sense). Sorry I'm writing so many messages, I just didn't think it over thoroughly enough when writing first message.

Regards,
Piotr.

[Cameron (GQueues Team)]

Thanks for the feedback, Piotr.

As you noted, if you treat the date in GQueues as the "start date" and add a duration, you can get pretty close to what you want.

This should also work for tasks with dates and no times, right?

So for your second example it might be something like this?

-Cameron

[Piotr Właziński]

Hi Cameron,

Thanks for answer. The problem with such approach is that within GQueues I do not see the true deadline for the task.

On the list I see the task with date in red which suggest it's overdue, it also comes up before the real deadline when filtering in Smart Queues.

However not to change whole logic of the app maybe for the tasks with set duration you could consider only displaying the end date after the start date in brackets? (as an option which can be switch on and off in Settings, if someone doesn't need this).

Something like this:



This, I believe, relatively simple change (only with the way information is presented, no change to the app logic) would allow to see immediately than like in the above example - the task should start on May 22nd last 3 days and be finished on May 24th, directly on the list, without opening the date/time dialog box (so I have it on the radar screen but I see the real due date).

I'm convinced that would help a lot to all of us who struggle with lack of separate start and end date. I hope you can consider such suggestion.

Best
Piotr